PREVIEW: Explore a new type of music festival with EMPAC’s TOPOS Festival
08/28 - 08/30 @ EMPAC and Troy Gasholder Building
“‘How can I be more open, not only to experiencing more work like this, but open in a way of bringing that into the world?’ These sort of evocative, artistic questions can be transferred to how we live our own lives.”
As the dog days of summer come to a close, you may be seeking some space for stillness and reflection to ease you into the cooler months. The TOPOS Festival, put on by EMPAC, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at RPI, is a perfect opportunity to find those experiences that ground you. Plus, with events taking place both at the EMPAC site itself and the historic Troy Gasholder House, the festival doubles as an excuse to explore downtown Troy.
In advance of this packed weekend, I had a chance to speak with TOPOS’ curator, Amadeus Julian Regucera, to gain insight into how the event and its atmosphere has been carefully planned. In considering this, Regucera explains that EMPAC is a “huge building with four different spaces in it—a concert hall, a theater and two studios—and each of them have their distinct characteristics and their distinct personalities. I thought about EMPAC as a gathering space, as a place where people come to listen, to be with one another, to listen together, to listen to the music, to listen to ourselves and how we experience the music. It all started off with this idea of place. And ‘topos' in Greek, means place. So I wanted it to be a site for people to come together.”
The pairing of artists with locations was equally as intentional as choosing the spaces in order to create the desired environment for audience members to fully experience the pieces. One such pairing was the Troy Gasholder building and the act Lazy Horse, a folk/country group that will be performing their first show. The building itself struck Reguerca because of the architecture and acoustics.
“I moved here from California. I grew up and went to school and was working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Things there don't have the same kind of history that they do in this part of the country. And there is a sense of history in that building. There are also crazy acoustics; the sort of reverb in there is wild. It bounces off the walls, and it's a circular building, so the sound is going every which way,” he describes.
“It'll be very complicated to mic and perform in there because of the wild acoustics. But I was so determined to have this particular act, Lazy Horse, in the space because of the history of the building and the sort of metaphorical history that's embedded in the sound of the band.”
Lazy Horse, a combination of The Living Earth Show—Travis Andrews and Andy Myerson—Raven Chacon, Mali Obomsawin, Steve Hammond, and Miriam Elhajli, use Spanish texts and old Spanish songs to bring the genre to its fullest intended capacity.
Other acts include King Britt’s Liberations: A Call with Suzie Analogue and Miles Ortiz-Green, Iannis Xenakis’ Persépolis (1971) realized by Micah Silver, and a screening of Xenakis Portrait 1971-1972 directed by Pierre Andrégui. Persépolis is so powerful and provocative that it’ll be performed twice – once on August 29 at 9:00 PM and once on August 30 at 3:00 PM.
The goal of the festival, for Regucera, is to bring people together to listen, experience, and engage deeply with the music and each other. Part of this engagement is asking questions of each other and of the performances.
“The larger questions, I think, are around openness. ‘How can I be more open, not only to experiencing more work like this, but open in a way of bringing that into the world? How can I be more open to my neighbor? How can I be more accepting and curious about the things that are happening in the world around me?’ You know, these sort of evocative, artistic questions can be transferred to how we live our own lives.”
And isn’t that the whole point of art?
Learn more about EMPAC’s TOPOS Festival at empac.rpi.edu/topos
